One form of electronic communication includes electronic mail (“email”), which allows people to communicate with each other almost instantaneously, which in itself gives email a considerable advantage over conventional mail (also known as snail mail). However, email has several other advantages over snail mail, including the ability to send graphics, images, sound files, text, etc., within a single document. The term “email” as used herein is to be interpreted broadly to include any type of electronic message including voicemail messages, short message service (SMS) messages, multi-media messaging service (MMS) messages, facsimile messages, and other forms of communication. The above-mentioned advantages have resulted in email becoming almost ubiquitous in its popularity.
Concomitant with this rise in the popularity of this mail over snail mail, has been the rise in the number of bulk unsolicited email messages (also known as spam). Spam detracts somewhat from on the advantages of email in that it is annoying to receive and can lead to a reduction in productivity.
The growth in spam has spawned a whole generation of anti-spam software that essentially seeks to filter out spam before it is delivered to the inbox of an email client. Generally, anti-spam software makes use of anti-spam filters that filter email based on the content of the email. For example, certain words and phrases such as “making money,” are known to be commonly used by spammers (the people who send spam) so that a filter can be designed to filter out email that use these words and phrases.
However, sometimes an email publication such as an email newsletter to which an email user is subscribed may end up being erroneously blocked as though it was spam because to a spam filter the email publication has attributes that make it resemble spam, e.g., the email newsletter may contain words commonly used by spammers.